Museum Georg Schäfer

Museum Georg Schäfer

The Museum Georg Schäfer is a German art museum in Schweinfurt, Bavaria, Germany. Based on the private art collection of German industrialist Georg Schäfer (1896–1975), the museum primarily collects 19th-century paintings by artists from German-speaking countries.

History

Having already inherited a nucleus of 19th-century German and Austrian paintings from his father, in the 1950s Georg Schäfer began actively collecting paintings by old masters and forgotten "lesser" masters which, at that time, were being overlooked by the more conservative regional art centres of Munich, Berlin, Dresden and Vienna.

As early as 1959, architect Erich Schelling drew up plans for a museum to house the collection. A later design by Mies van der Rohe was rejected when the Schweinfurt city council declined to assume the cost of maintaining the museum. The plans were later adapted for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

The city of Schweinfurt and the Schäfer family finally came to an agreement on housing the collection in a museum in 1988, but those plans were delayed due to a financial crisis in the FAG Kugelfischer company, which led Schäfer's heirs to mortgage the art collection. By the end of 1997 the family had regained control of much of the collection and established a foundation to protect it. City officials meanwhile secured resources for the museum, and in February 1997 de won the commission to design the museum.

The museum is situated next to the city hall (Rathaus) at the southern entry to downtown Schweinfurt and was opened to the public on 23 September 2000.

Collection

• The museum is home to 950 paintings, 270 of which are on constant display.
• The museum has a comprehensive collection of 160 paintings and 110 drawings by Carl Spitzweg.
• Other artists represented in the collection are Caspar David Friedrich, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Carl Rottmann, Domenico Quaglio the Younger, Albrecht Adam, Wilhelm von Kobell, Fritz von Uhde, Wilhelm Leibl, Adolph Menzel, Franz von Lenbach, Hans Thoma, Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, Max Slevogt, and Max Beckmann.

Works in the collection

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  Jakob Philipp Hackert: The Fischer Family at Night Bonfire with Roaring Sea, 1778

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  Franz Pforr: Sulamith and Maria, 1811

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  Wilhelm von Kobell: Hunters in the Alps, 1828

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  Caspar David Friedrich: Flat Landscape on the Bay of Greifswald (Seascape, Evening on the Baltic Sea), ca. 1830-1834

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  Friedrich Overbeck: Italy and Germany, 1840 to 1850

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  The Bookworm (1st version), ca.1850 by Carl Spitzweg

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  Carl Spitzweg: The Cactus Friend, before 1858

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  Adolph von Menzel: The Beer Garden, 1883

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  Max Slevogt: Death Dance, 1896